Demonoid
Demonoid is a website and BitTorrent tracker that was originated by an individual known only by the pseudonym Deimos. The website indexes torrents uploaded by its members. It was the second largest and second most used public tracker for over a year, the 403rd most popularly ranked website in July 2007 according to Alexa, and had an estimated 3 million peers in September 2007. The site went off-line on November 9 2007 due to alleged legal threats from the Canadian Recording Industry Association. On April 11, 2008 the site was brought back on-line. A news announcement was posted on the homepage announcing that site had a new administrator due to the departure of Deimos, who reportedly left the position because of personal reasons. Membership The website features a publicly accessible search tool. Previously, membership had been required to download more than 3 torrents per week or to download torrent files older than a few days. Registration is opened periodically when resources permit. Users have the ability to create a limited number of invitation codes to send to others during closed registration periods.Demonoid FAQ: Why is the registration closed periodically? Demonoid tracks and displays users' upload/download ratios but takes no action against users with low ratios. Demonoid previously banned users with low ratios, but stopped doing so due to the ratio system being inaccurate for some users. Features Demonoid categorizes torrents under Anime, Applications, Audio Books, Books, Comics, Games, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Music Videos, Pictures, or TV. They disallow the uploading of pornographic material and possible viruses from the files uploaded. Many categories have various subcategories or divisions that allow a search to be more specific. Demonoid features RSS with different feeds for each category and sub category to keep users aware of the latest torrent posted on the site. These RSS feeds link to the Demonoid page and not directly to the torrent file. RSS plug-ins for the various BitTorrent clients are not able to directly download the torrent file and begin the file sharing. Although Demonoid removed torrents over a year old on August 4, 2006 to free tracker resources, the site had over 199,629 user submitted torrents indexed as of October 21, 2007. Legal issues Twelve cease and desist letters to users of Demonoid were found in a July 2007 study by Slyck.com. In the Netherlands On June 26 2007, Demonoid went down for hardware failures, supposedly unrelated to concurrent legal issues. Demonoid's ISP Leaseweb had been ordered by the Dutch police to take down the website. Later, the Dutch anti-piracy organization Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland filed a subpoena against Leaseweb, demanding that Demonoid be taken down with a penalty of €50,000 per day otherwise. Leaseweb, after delaying as long as possible, divulged to BREIN the name, address, and banking information of the registered owner of Demonoid.com, and signed the cease and desist demand. It is unclear whether Leaseweb treated this in the same manner in which they appealed for another client, Everlasting.nu. Planning for this, Demonoid moved to Laval, Quebec, Canada to avoid BREIN's jurisdiction. The time needed to relocate was speculated to be the real reason behind the downtime, with BREIN describing it as a game of hide and seek. In Canada On September 25 2007, the Demonoid website, forums and trackers went off-line. They came back four days later with the exception of the website, which came back the day after. Over the next few days, the website continued experiencing intermittent downtime until October 2. The explanation as widely speculated was that they had received a letter from a lawyer for the Canadian Recording Industry Association threatening legal action. Demonoid began blocking Canadian traffic, a strategy similar to that taken by isoHunt and TorrentSpy in blocking American traffic to avoid RIAA complaints. Visitors from Canadian-based IPs would be redirected to the downtime version of the website, which contained an explanation of the legal threats. The threats are in spite of the open question of the legality of music file sharing in Canada. The CRIA has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement despite Demonoid's claims. On November 9 2007, the website was shut down with a placeholder page, stating, "The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site on-line. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding." According to the IRC channel, the trackers themselves were not affected. Six days later, the placeholder page was updated with a link to a new forum, unrelated to file sharing, for the community. On November 29 2007, Deimos posted on that forum a problem preventing the site from coming back up: Current status On April 10, 2008, Deimos stepped down as the administrator of Demonoid, citing a number of reasons and "distraction with real-world issues" as the cause. He also stated that he has "handed the reins over to a new administrator - a close friend of mine, which I trust completely and has the knowledge and time to take care of the site." Over the course of the next few days, RSS feeds for the site came back online and by April 16, 2008 a mass email was sent out to all Demonoid users to advise that the site was "finally back online." The servers are located in Ukraine. References Further reading * External links *Demonoid.com *Demonoid.cc – backup site *Subdemon.com – forum From BitTorrent Wiki, a Wikia wiki.